Ballard P-Patch Celebrates 50 Years

Sep 7

2 min read

By Cindy Krueger

The Ballard P-Patch celebrated its 50^th birthday at the annual Art in the Garden Community Festival on Saturday, August 1. Founded in 1976 by members of Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Congregation, the Ballard P-Patch is one of the oldest gardens in Seattle’s P-Patch Program.

At just over one-half acre, the garden is the largest P-Patch in Ballard. A variety of plots serve over 90 gardeners, and an additional 2,000 square feet is dedicated to growing produce for the Ballard Food Bank. Garden volunteers also reclaimed unusable slopes leading down from the parking lot and turned them into a community herb garden and an all-native pollinator garden.

The Ballard P-Patch’s existence today is something of a miracle, as Our Redeemer’s needed to sell the garden in 2019 to pay for needed repairs to their 1940s building. Leaning into Ballard’s Scandinavian heritage and folklore, the gardeners claimed the gnome (a traditional protector of the house and garden) as their mascot, launching the campaign to save the garden at Ballard’s Sytennde Mai parade with the slogan “Give the Gnome a Home”.

With two years of dedicated hard work (including through the Covid 19 pandemic) and critical support from GROW, the gardeners wrote grants, lobbied legislators, developed fundraisers, and raised the $2.2 million required to purchase the land. In early 2021, the gardeners were able to turn the property over to GROW with a conservation easement protecting this beloved green space from any future development.

They successfully “gave the gnome a home”.

Organic produce and flowers are not the only things that flourish in this community garden. Friendship, connection, exercise, and the benefits of fresh air and fingers in the dirt are just some of the additional joys of gardening in a community space. As the garden’s motto states, “Dig Deep, Cultivate Community,” the Ballard P-Patch has always prioritized the community aspect of community gardening.

This commitment is reflected in their annual Art in the Garden festival. Completely volunteer-organized and managed, the 24^th year of the event featured more than 25 artists and craftspeople, a beer garden with grilled bratwurst, a live music stage, a bake sale, a wine grab, kids’ activities, and an artist raffle. Art in the Garden has been a beloved community tradition for the past 24 years, with many artists returning year after year and claiming it’s their favorite event.